AMD talks a lot of utter tosh about ATI

All that AMD had to do to drop the ATI brand was to quietly shuffle the terminally ill patient down a corridor, give it a big dose of opium and wait for it to breathe its last.

But AMD never does things by halves. Rather than quietly let ATI do its death rattle in private, the company decided to make a huge song and dance about the logic of killing the brand.

And AMD continues to make a song and dance about it, attempting to justify its decision on the basis of “a survey” which it hasn’t released details of, but which we suspect is based more on internal PR and marketing wars rather than hard facts.

Now John Volkmann has decided to elaborate on AMD’s decision, thus flying in the face of the common sense diktat: “If you’re in a hole, stop digging”.

Volkmann’s bog, here, says that “we at AMD believe – actually we know – that processor brands are largely irrelevant in the PC buying decision”. If that’s the case, AMD might as well forget its own brand too, rather than wibble on about Vision.

Vision is many things, and 20/20 Vision is of course absolutely perfect in hindsight.

We’d like to know exactly what AMD has got against stickers. It is now a stickerist company. Is the idea to change AMD’s name to Vision? That would be funny.

In any case, the hoohah is meaningless and no one really cares about the “death of a brand”. But as Volkmann has decided to bang on and on about it, we challenge him to make this AMD “survey” public knowledge and open source it.

It’s only fair, isn’t it, because it seems AMD’s “vision” right now is to keep banging on and on about this topic? Oh, and Mr Volkmann, brands do not “evolve” – we don’t think that Charles Darwin found stickers and logos on the Galapagos Islands way back then.